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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

If you prefer learning by practicing, Lichess has a great introduction to most tactical patterns: https://lichess.org/practice

Once you start mastering them, you can try real problems on Lichess as well (https://lichess.org/training), or try solving as many as you can in five minutes (https://chesscup.org/), it's a lot of fun!

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I've never been good at chess, nor felt like I was making any progress on paper chess problems. Not that I really tried to solve them.

But lichess training was really engaging for me. I played it for a few hours, and I found the format of the problems and the ui nice in a way that let me solve things pretty quickly. I like that all of them are formatted as "do the best moves", and yet some of them end in checkmate, while others end with just getting a really favorable trade.

It felt like 90% of the plays involved making a check, and then using the forced response to gain an advantage. Is that representative of actual play though? I get that you can't make a deterministic puzzle unless there's a fairly deterministic right answer and path to get there. But what fraction of good chess thinking resembles solving these kinds of puzzles?

Tactics are really important on amateur play. Perhaps the most important thing. If you know a few basic principles (move each piece at most once in the opening, control the center, etc), and you can spot tactics, you will reach a quite high level. Heck, even ignoring strategic principles at lower levels, as long as you have good tactical vision you will go quite far ahead because the opponent will make mistakes.

There are not always "tactics" in chess games in the sense of having a move sequence being considerably better than any other one. Nevertheless, when there are, there are factors that limit your opponent's choices and one of these factors is a check.

I also really enjoy the "Magnus Trainer" app:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnus-trainer-train-chess/id1...

To be honest, I find Lichess tactics to be a bit too obvious in the sense of not requiring as much foresight into what the opponent might do, at least in comparison to Chess Tempo which may have say, a fork but it requires more steps to get there. I'm not a great player, but I find myself generally more stumped by Chess Tempo tactics puzzles than Lichess.

That depends on the strength of the puzzle? I find them pretty difficult once you get above 2000 or so.

Does lichess practice have anything about fundamental principles? Like another commenter mentioned here, control the center etc. It looks like the current selection is mostly tactical, which will help with puzzles, but the fundamentals are missing (which will help with the basics of an actual game).

I think the chess puzzles are what could shine in this book:

http://www.chessproblems.org/ (it is the Chess Quizzer from the OP)

I have tried a few, and I enjoy the explanation of the solutions in plain English. Short and clear.

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